What's the best alternative to Boy Scouts out there? I really appreciate my Scouting experience and would probably want my kids to have the same thing if I have any, but BSA is clearly fucking dunhere.

As Belisarius said, this is already happening, but it'd be good if they could find a way to coalesce into one large alternative organization. One problem with BSA alternatives is they tend to be tiny and therefore lack the infrastructure that makes the BSA such a big deal.

It's less lib, but it's basically an extremely conservative Christian religious organization (check their Who We Are page on their website). That's fine, but I kinda liked how the BSA promoted Christian values without actually being an explicitly religious organization.

Before you go any further: this story contains content some readers may find offensive.

If Sydney ever had a superhero, maybe it was Trough Man.

This character would lie down in the male urinals at dance parties in the 1980s and enjoy a long golden shower. At least, that's what I'd heard.

I came across the story gradually over the years, at social functions like dinner parties, as people got a bit drunker and the talk got more interesting.

I grew up in the "disco sux" era, though I never wore a badge. It didn't really suck ó it sounded better every year and if you ever wanted to give a party a lift, disco music always worked a treat, in any era.

The Trough Man story seemed to have similar powers.

I was intrigued, and started to make some inquiries.

A mysterious character in the urinal

Online I found a lot of material about Trough Man: a short film, a Wikipedia page, and a few links that we can't share for obvious reasons, but you can look up yourself if you're interested. Try water and sports and Trough and Man.

Disco Inferno poster

Photo: Trough Man was a regular fixture at gay-friendly dance parties in Sydney in the 80s. (Supplied: Greg Appel)

When I started asking around Sydney's gay community, I was unsure how they would take my line of questioning.

Would it be considered infantile, if not outright offensive? The initial approach usually began with: "I know all gay people don't know all other gay people ... but ..."

It became quite a detective story, and I was led to an eyewitness who told me what it was like to encounter Trough Man at a club.

"In the old days at the showground parties, you'd go into the toilets and someone would always twist off the neon lights, you'd get there and it would be really dark," says artist Gareth Ernst.

"You'd just hear sounds, you'd get to the urinal, and there'd be this body in front of you rolling around, wanting you to piss on him.

"He was kind of nameless and a little bit mysterious Ö he never said a word."

A time when the rules didn't apply

Trough Man was just one of many characters who made gatherings like the annual Mardi Gras' Sleaze balls and the famous RAT parties such colourful events.

As Tim Ritchie, a DJ from the time, reminisced: "The rules didn't apply.

Listen to the documentary

Greg Appel goes deep into Sydney's gay history in search of Trough Man.

"It was this feeling of being on the edge. It didn't feel dangerous, but it felt positively unsafe in a good way."

HIV cast a cloud over the gay club scene in the mid-80s, and some people told me that Trough Man had been a casualty.

I'd pretty much given up trying to find him when a friend's work colleague invited me to join the closed Facebook group "Lost Gay Sydney".

People were incredibly helpful, and my post about dance party characters and DJs became quite active. It turns out social media is good for something.

It wasn't long before an email appeared in my inbox. It was the real Trough Man!

Meeting the real Trough Man

Barry turned out to be a very unassuming gentleman in his mid-60s.

You'd never realise he had been involved in such extreme behaviour ó but I was meeting the Clark Kent version of his character.

"Going right back, it was pretty clear I was gay when I was about 17," he told me.

"It wasn't easy to do that back in 1967, particularly in suburban Punchbowl, where I came from.

"Once I had my first sexual experience I realised the laws had to be changed."

Trough Man standing outside a male toilet.

Photo: Barry, once better known as Trough Man, is now in his mid-60s. (ABC RN: Tiger Webb)

Barry had originally got into "water sports" when he saw it being done at a bar in New York in 1978.

He was also one of the original marchers in Sydney's first Mardi Gras protest, that same year: a march that has since turned into the huge annual event.

"I didn't do it to be famous, it wasn't planned," he said.

"The two things came together, my newly discovered sexual proclivity and my whole political involvement. Somehow they became enmeshed."

'It just wasn't our party anymore'

Maybe Trough Man was a superhero, out there at venues like Sydney's Hordern Pavilion through all those long nights, fighting for our right to party.

"I was part of this wild era, where there weren't all these restrictions," he said.

"When Fox Studios took over the showgrounds and the Hordern Pavilion it all changed. You just weren't allowed to do that sort of thing.

"I can remember the last Mardi Gras party I went to. There was a whole group of us in the toilets playing around when security came in and shut the whole thing down.

"It just wasn't our party anymore, and so I stopped going."

The new world of occupational health and safety laws had caught up with Barry and the warehouse parties.

I wonder what will happen to the Girl Scouts. Each org has its own feature that the other covets with Girl Scouts having easy access to fundraising through Girl Scout cookies and Boy Scouts having a prestigious achievement in the Eagle Scout rank. Seems like most serious outdoors kids and their families will just join Boy Scouts though.

-The Boy Scouts are (or were) an organization that views men and women as different, and it was focused on teaching boys to be good men. Adding girls dilutes this purpose and makes them more of a mundane skills club.

-Both sexes benefit from having access to social groups that are only of their sex.

-Adding girls will feminize the character of the Scouts and probably make boys not want to join in the first place.

Date: October 11th, 2017 1:44 PMAuthor: A Jurisprudence is Performed (verified poaster )

Girls have been in explorers, which is like a senior version of Boy Scouts, four years. But what it sounds like they're doing here is making a direct competitor to Girl Scouts. This is awesome because Girl Scouts is an atheist communist limp wristed organization that needs to be shut down

The latter. I stayed in from 12-18 and copped eagle near the end only due to my dad pushing me. I loved scouts but after all thatís happened this seemed inevitable. I wonder if the mormons knew this was coming and thatís why they dropped scouting.

Date: October 11th, 2017 2:12 PMAuthor: A Jurisprudence is Performed (verified poaster )

this isn't going to come close to reversing that trend. There just isn't that much demand among women to be Boy Scouts.

The problem with girls-only troops is that you need a critical mass to form a functioning troop. Most areas won't have more than 3-4 girls who actually want to join BSA and that won't be enough. So you'll have these ghost troops, who don't actually do anything, and then they'll start insisting that they should be able to be joined with the nearest boy troop in their activities.

yeah the declining membership argument holds no water for me. the scouts are a cultural touchstone so it's natural that membership will ebb and flow with time. admitting girls devalues the institution as a whole even if membership rises in the short-term.

Exactly, and it's most alienating to the groups that cared most about the Scouts. My Scout troop growing up wasn't even affiliated with a church, but all the adults who were most heavily involved are livid about these changes. A lot of them have quit their involvement outright.

cr, that's exactly right, which is why I think those people are in a reasonably good position to coalesce and spin off a new group.

i talk about this all the time as it relates to sports.

sports and their leagues constantly make bad decisions in order to draw in more casual and non-fans, but the problem is always that those decisions end up decreasing enjoyment for those fans who are most passionate.

You people don't get it. Shitlibs WILL NOT STOP until they have burned every noble institution this country has ever had to the ground. They need to be purged. Hitler did nothing wrong, except failing to fully kill all shitlibs

From what I've seen of Cub/Boy Scouts, it is weird as fuck. I'm not seeing much to cry about. They should have been integrated from the start. Plus, aren't they already letting in queers and trannies? At that point, what possible justification is there for not having girls?

Also, while some countries have problems, this really isn't why. And US gender relations are seriously some of the worst in the world.